INTERESTING TO MERCANTILE MEN.

New Zealand Times, Volume XXXIV, Issue 5546, 7 January 1879, Page 2

INTERESTING TO MERCANTILE MEN.

(PER PRESS AGENCY.) Dunedin, Monday. At the criminal sittings of the Supreme Court, which commenced to-day, Mr. Justice Williams, in charging the jury, said —There is a case where the accused is charged under the Fraudulent Debtors Act with having as a trader obtained property on credit under the false pretences of carrying on. business and dealing iu the ordinary way of his trade. At the preliminary proceedings before the magistrate, the trustee in bankruptcy of the accused was examined, and gave evidence as to statements made by the accused to him as trustee. By an Act, however, passed last session, this evidence is no longer admissible against the accused, so you will have to consider the case independently of it. The evidence is that the accused was a retail grocer, and that the day before he filed his declaration of insolvency he ordered and subsequently obtained from a merchant with whom he had been in the habit of dealing certain bags of sugar which he did not pay for. If you think that an order given by a retail trader for goods of a kind dealt with in his trade to a wholesale house, with whom he had been in the habit of dealing, amounts to representation that the goods were required for ordinary trade purposes, and if you think from the circumstances that the retail trader became bankrupt the day after he gave the order, affords a reasonable inference that the representation was false, you will find a true bill.